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1989 - 1996 Cut 'n' Mix Precursors: I first taught myself BASIC programming in 1989. My sole initial objective in doing so was to create an automated Cut-up application. I called my first automated cut-up application "Word Demon". It was a DOS command line application with the words to be mixed embedded right in the program code. Every time I wanted to mix a new word pool, I would type the new words into the program code, recompile and run. It was not user friendly, nor probably usable but anyone other than myself. Several years later, when I was learning Windows application development, I decided to create a new version. "WordMachine" was the result of this experiment: an application which could load text from files with a standard file dialog. The output was very restrictive though, with each letter of every reordered word represented as a bitmap image. Although visually quite nifty, the cut-ups were limited to a very small amount of words, and could not be edited or saved. |
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1997 - Cut 'n' Mix Version 1: The first version of Cut 'n' Mix introduced the idea of mixing separate text files and controlling the word pick probabilities with the faders you might see on an audio recording four track. Since the mid 80's, I had been doing a lot of 4-track recording and was interested to see what type of texts could be produced by applying a similar technique to word cut-up. The output processing in the first few versions of Cut 'n' Mix were very limited. For reasons that escape me now, I decided to add the mix output line by line to a list control: The end result was that you could not do any further editing to the output results. (There was however, a capability to write the output contents to disk). |
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1999 - Cut 'n' Mix Version 2: The second version of Cut 'n' Mix had a Fragmenting Preprocessor which fragmented individual words and then reassembled these fragments into new words in each mix where the GLUE setting had been applied. The "preproceesor" was actually a separate application launched from hitting a button on the main mixing console. There was still no way to edit the output inside the application. In these first versions of Cut 'n' Mix, there was a heavy emphasis on the look of the buttons. I wanted the application to look like some whacky machine, somewhat like the freaked-out boom box on the cover of Malcom McLaren's Duck Rock album. |
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2003 - Cut 'n' Mix Version 3: Version 3 of Cut 'n' Mix might have been the most bland looking Cut 'n' Mix ever, but it was the most advanced in terms of functionality. Now you could edit the output, undo a mix, view the input track text, and paste directly into the input tracks. Input tracks could be "shuffled" so that the contents could be randomly reorganized without having to execute a track "mix". This version was written in Java with the intention to provide cross-platform capabilities to Linux and Mac users. Unfortunately, not all flavours of Java are exactly the same, and the time required to test on all platforms, paired with the hassle of requiring users to download and install the Java runtime convinced me to abandon this direction. |